Gloria

Gloria was your name, is your name, will be your name.

***

Dear Gloria,

You had me going so that I didn't know how to stay still.  Legs swung off the tailgate like a body hung and shaken by the wind.  What was that place?  Looking at your hair as it covered your eyes, I saw that you didn't want me to see.  You were dying.  But aren't we all in some stage of death, daily, hourly, moment-arily?  And when it does come to a close, is there a purpose anymore?  Of course, I didn't ask you that, just as you, in your final weeks, didn't tell me you were afraid, that you couldn't stand the sight of me, that you would have rather we both turned away before the whole thing got ugly.  I listened to your breathing, harsh and troubled as you exhaled.  We were sitting on the edge of this tailgate looking out over the ocean, high up on a cliff, waves crashing under our feet.  One of us was ready to die while the other, swinging her legs, hoped for a miracle.  It's cruel how some creatures get more time on this earth than others.  I put my arms around you and nestled my face into your fur.  We promised to meet again.  You whimpered and licked my face as the cool evening air rushed against our backs.

***

I fell in love with you the moment I found that you could talk underwater.  I was born underwater and never surfaced.  It was important, though difficult to find others willing to communicate with me, to chance opening their mouths even a moment to release a sound.  They feared, and rightfully so, the vast expanse of liquid depth, the dark blue deep, the weight of meta-living, that would fill them so completely that they would, undoubtedly, be inseparable from their watery context.  Most won't choose this life, but you, you and me, we're hopelessly sunk, so embedded in the metaphor that there would be no returning to the surface.  And who would want to return?  How we revel in our octopus' garden, swimming in and out of stone castles on the sea floor. 

***

Whose memories am I writing?  Whose stories?  Mine?  Another mine?  Gloria, who are you?

coffee orange sky blue

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow and the glint of the paint in mid-afternoon showers.  I know this.  And still I smear the paint.  What a mess it turned out to be.  Why do we do this to one another?  So harsh, so brutally objective with the emotions of the other.  You push me to say the things I do not want to say, but want to say, but shouldn’t say, but must say because you demand them.  You bring out the brute in me.  I am not, by nature, a biting creature.  Yet here I am, snapping at you with regretful sighs and salt water in my head.  Why do we do this to one another? 

in the library

I wish I smoked sometimes, I feel that would impregnate my silences with some sort of meaning like I was brooding intentionally, not the reality which is I can’t remember or I don’t know.  Lovely.

You’re not from around here are you?  Automatically you think that.  It’s easy for me to go with.  That.  Why not?  No, I’m not from around here, but yes I am.  I grew up right around the corner, I went to school up the street, I wore a mu’umu’u in a parade and sang Hawaiian songs in a choir.  For the first time, I don’t feel blasé about someone not knowing that I’m from here.  For the first time I feel a little strange. 

I held a copy of the application for the Vermont studio of arts fellowship, a print out that I needed.  Due in a week.  A dream, come to term, or not, but will be forced out of me because some sort of omnipotent force has deemed it ready.  And in my other hand a book of poems by Ginsberg.  She knew him or knew of his work I should say, and so she felt it only necessary to inform me that she was a poet as well.  Lay her beside Ginsberg and she would say he’s taking her limelight.  One of those.  A confident artist.  They always seem suspect to me. 

Then we started talking poetry as I absent mindedly folded the application into the pages of Ginsberg.  Perhaps I was hoping he’d rub off on me.  We talked about poetry and about poets and about slams.  There was a degree of arrogance and yet I continued to swim in her pool sullied by self righteousness because it was pool with a poet nonetheless and they seem to be in short supply round me lately. 

I dreamt of connections, human connections, emotional connections.  I dreamt of you and you.  But not you.  I stroke my neck softly in the hopes that my hand will transform into someone elses, yours or yours.  Meet a real writer.  I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.  Someone who has been through it, someone who knows.  Knows?  The pain, the despair, the desire.  I know these things.  There is a projection I put out that I’m not happy with.  Are you from here?  Aren’t you young?  I’m feeling underestimated and misunderstood in my time.  signs that I will be a great artist someday.  Surely.  To look at the milk as less sour and to suck on the chunky bits because.  I waited for the writers and they were nowhere to be found. 

human noise

they are gone, the big black bumble bees.  i liked their hum, their base, it was comforting in the way sighing is comforting or fingering the rosary is comforting or listening to mother's heartbeat is comforting.  but there are human noises now.  and they are cacophonous.  there is a difference between human-made noise and the sounds of everything else natural.  the sounds of nature meld nicely with one another, the waves rumble and the bees buzz and the birds chirp.  there is no need to take over, no need to negate the other.  but human noise--the sound of a car door slamming, the alarm beep of a unlocking vehicle, the ting-ting of an aluminum can hitting the side of a metal trash barrel--takes over everything.  it's sharp and loud and demands precedence.  it's deafening.

seeks other

comfortable
knowing the respiration's of another
breath soft downy feathered owlet,
go up and out,
draw in,
up and out,
draw in.
revel in another's life,
alive in the inhale. 

a Congo rages inside
alive with many tropical birds
and many rivers
and many banyan trees. 
won't you walk inside me? 

the bomb that almost went boom

He kicked a grenade.  I wasn’t aware of this until after the fact, until after I watched him sprint, hiking boots beaten and swollen from where his ankles bucked and yawed against the sharp and shifty lava they traversed each day, soles nearly scuffed out of existence, his baggy blue jeans ripped in the knees and the wand of his backpack sprayer trailing like a tail scared of being left behind.  He didn’t shout, just sprinted, like a scream would slow him down, or perhaps there wasn’t enough breath, perhaps there was no room for excess, only energy enough for muscles pulling at tendons pulling at bone pulling at survival.  He kicked a grenade on purpose, he later admitted.  Obviously nothing happened or else I couldn’t be writing this.  The unexploded ordinance, or UXO, was a timed grenade which responded to a particular number of rotations.  At its birth, the nascent projectile catapulted through bright Hawaiian skies, ticking off each rotation much as a click of a trigger in a Russian Roulette playing revolver.  Perhaps the soldier responsible for its deployment had dust in his eye or maybe someone bumped him, perhaps the ground jumped, whatever the reason, the grenade touched down before it could complete its rotations.  So they supposed it was a dud or maybe they just forgot about it, either way, the volatile little thing slept in the dirt waiting for just the right amount of movement to awaken its mission.   

He thought it was a dud too until he kicked it and revealed that the little guy was far from dead, rather just hibernating.  Even if he did shout, it wouldn’t have helped; we’d be dead anyways, nothing more than projectile plasma over some jagged rocks, as liquefied as the herbicide on our backs.  Isn’t life a miraculous thing?  What if he kicked a little harder?  How many more rotations were left on the little guy?  You won’t believe what I get paid to scoot around bombs; I’ll tell you it isn’t much.  Not worth a human life.  Or maybe.  What’s the going rate for a human life these days?   

Sunflower Eyes

You are spinning face-

flush
to the sky.
Arms spindling outward
from the center of my eye.
Wrapping everything in your whirlwind
tattooing tree bark on my skin.
You make me see differently
sunflower eyes.